Plants bred or engineered to be shorter resist windstorms and may bring higher yields and reduce pesticide use
Plants bred or engineered to be short can stand up better to windstorms. They could also boost yields and benefit the environmentFarmers can drive a tractor through fields of corn bred to be shorter, allowing them to add fertilizer later in the year.On 10 August 2020, a record-breaking windstorm raced across Iowa, the big buckle of the U.S. Corn Belt. Gusts up to 225 kilometers per hour flattened fields and buildings, with losses totaling an estimated $12 billion across several states.
Bayer is now wrapping up its final round of U.S. trials, which took place this summer across 12,000 hectares in Iowa and three nearby states. The company plans to start selling seed to U.S. farmers next year,and at least one other large seed company, Corteva Agriscience, will soon follow suit with its own varieties.
Even so, between 2001 and 2016, about 800,000 hectares of corn fields were damaged by high winds, according to U.S. government crop insurance claims. That’s not much compared with the 38 million hectares damaged by drought during the same period, but enough that companies see it as a selling point for short corn.
Initial attempts resulted in corn plants that were far too short to be commercially viable. But after considerable tinkering, Gillespie and her colleagues solved the problem in collaboration with the company BASF. They added DNA that encodes microRNAs, small molecules that can suppress genes. In this case the targets were two genes that regulate the creation of gibberellin mainly in the leaves and stalk, resulting in plants that were one-third shorter.
Whether conventionally bred or genetically engineered, short corn has other advantages, says Fred Below, a crop physiologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who has received funding from Bayer to study its new hybrids. Because the plant puts fewer resources into its stalk, it can divert more into roots—though Vyn notes that the extent to which this actually happens hasn’t been fully studied.
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